https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/the-evil-of-the-daleks-by-simon-guerrier-and-joh...

This really is one of the best Black Archive volumes that I have read so far, and also I think the longest. Some earlier ones went rather far into the literary origins of particular Who stories, perhaps because there wasn’t all that much to say about the actual stories in question. Guerrier looks at that a little, but doesn’t waste too much time on it, and is much more interested in telling the story of Evil of the Daleks – both production and reception – as a social process, carried out in real time by real people. As I’ve done before, I’ll list out the (few and long) chapters in summary:

London, 20 July 1966: Looks at the difficulties of analysing a story that is mostly lost, and at the production background and influences on the fist episode and a half (no woman appears in the 1966 scenes; originally Ben and Polly would have been in the first two episodes, and the Samantha Briggs character from The Faceless Ones would have been the new companion);
Outside Canterbury, 2 to 3 June 1866: looks at the Victorian setting of the middle episodes and Victoriana in general, but also at the character of Maxtible (Marius Goring, the lead guest star, had a fixation with Henry Irving and his play The Bells, which is one of the artistic source for Evil) and what we learn about the Doctor;
Skaro: Date Unknown: goes into great detail on the Daleks and on what Terry Nation and David Whitaker might have argued about, given that Whitaker arguably had an equal share in their creation; and
Earth, 1967-2017: looking at the reception and preservation of the story over fifty years – lot of deep research into how and where the scripts were preserved, featuring in places my old friend Rebecca Levene; the Beatles’ song Paperback Writer was played during the original cafe scene in the first episode, but has been dropped from releases of the sound track for copyright reasons; new photographs and off-air recordings keep coming to light.
Guerrier ends by appealing for the animation of the missing episodes which has since been accomplished, but also (as usual for these books) has a decent bibliography. It’s a really solid piece of work.

My one complaint is that yet again the footnotes have been botched on the epub version. Clicking on any of the hundreds of footnote links in the text takes you to the start of the footnote section rather than to the relevant footnote itself. When you have found your footnote and ty to click back to where you were in the main text, you are taken instead to the start of the relevant chapter – and these are long chapters. No blame attaches to the author for this, but really, publisher, this is not rocket science and you got it right in several of the others. ( )